The news of Barney Frank’s death has shattered the quiet of my gin-sodden morning. The man who once reduced a homophobic heckler to a puddle of stammering inadequacy with a single raised eyebrow has shuffled off this mortal coil. Age 86.
The number itself feels like a typo. Frank was eternal, a force of nature wrapped in a rumpled suit and a bow tie that seemed to signal: 'I have better things to do than care about your opinions.' He was the first openly gay member of Congress to come out voluntarily, a fact that seems almost quaint now, but at the time was a scandal of seismic proportions.
He weathered it with the same corrosive wit he deployed against bank CEOs. 'On the one hand, you have a man who slept with men,' he once said. 'On the other, a man who slept with the American taxpayer.
' He was referring, of course, to the 2008 financial crisis, which he helped unravel with a forensic fury that would make a bloodhound weep. He was a Democrat, yes, but he was also a fiscal hawk who believed in regulation with the zeal of a Puritan. He co-wrote the Dodd-Frank Act, a piece of legislation that remains the only set of shackles the banking class has ever worn.
They hated him for it. He loved that. 'The banks are not my constituents,' he snapped at a lobbyist who dared approach him.
'My constituents are the people who lost their homes.' It was a line that could have come from a script, but Frank delivered it with the weary authority of a man who had seen the rot and decided to name it. He leaves behind a husband, Jim Ready, a man who must now navigate the world without the sharpest tongue in Washington.
There will be tributes, of course. Vapid statements from politicians who never knew him. But the truest memorial will be the silence of the bankers who once quailed at his approach.
They will breathe easier now. The rest of us must drink to his memory. Pass the gin, and spare a thought for the man who taught us that gay men could be just as boring and brilliant as anyone else.
Goodbye, Barney. You were a bastard in the best possible way.
